Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master, the Essential Writings.

THOMAS MERTON: SPIRITUAL MASTER, THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS, edited and introduced by Lawrence S. Cunningham, Paulist Press, $14.95, 437pp.

Like the proverbial Cheshire Cat, Thomas Merton may have departed but he keeps making appearances. In the quarter of a century since his death, not only have his writings been issued and reissued, but he has been the subject of a steady stream of books, studies, dissertations, and monographs. A recent catalogue from Credence Cassettes offers over fifty Merton tapes.

The century's most conspicuous and loquacious Catholic monk, Merton was a man of paradoxes, if not contradictions, a hermit attached to place who died a long way from home, figuratively as well as literally. The present collection of Merton's "spiritual writings," introduced and selected by the indefatigable Lawrence S. Cunningham, should be long in print. If it does not settle the matter of whether Merton is indeed a "spiritual master," it will certainly help keep the question in play.

Without doubt, Merton was a most complex and compelling individual who chose an unusual path. Yet his longings and his struggles were not foreign to a sizable number of his contemporaries, as his best-seller status indicated. Nearly half of the present volume is given over to autobiographical writings. In them Merton can be maddening for his self-preoccupations, exhilarating for his self-knowledge and self-transcendence. He was, in a sense, the Existential Monk in an existential age.

Cunningham takes up Merton's many facets in his substantive introduction and in preludes to each individual selection from Merton's writings. As readers of Commonweal have come to expect, Cunningham is simultaneously sure-sighted in his critical evaluations and personally generous. Here he not only notes the contributions of others to Merton studies but points out their most significant insights into specific aspects of Merton's career and thought.

But it is Merton himself who presides here, both in Cunningham's commentary and in the text: Merton the monk, the theologian, and the catholic writer attuned not only to his times but to the timeless. Thus, in one of the finest essays in the collection, "Rain and the Rhinoceros," Merton reflects from a solitary Kentucky holier on the nature of the nuclear threat and the equally destructive isolation within the individualist crowd. The essay first appeared in the glossy pages of the travel magazine Holiday. It must have startled that journal's comfortable readers. It gives us a keen sense of Merton's irony, the recluse who has withdrawn from the world but sees to the heart of its ethical and spiritual conundrums. Take this sentence from another essay, published seven years before Roe v Wade: "Choice cannot be free from the frustrating, tormenting division between good and evil. Hence, subjective choice cannot be an absolute."

It is not as ethicist that we look to Merton in this volume, however, but as master of the spirit. As this collection demonstrates, Merton's understanding of his own tradition was uncommon, developed over years of study, reflection, writing, prayer, and giving direction to others. His openness to other traditions, from Zen to Hasidism (it is unfortunate that his essay, "The Good Samaritan," which deals in part with the Hebrew concept of hesed--mercy--was not included in this volume) to Sufism, was legendary and has had a remarkable effect, broadening the Catholic spirit for a whole generation of Merton readers.

Yet for all that, the glimpses of Merton's own prayer and mystical sense, as Cunningham points out, glimmer at only select points. That a man of so many words and spiritual interests so seldom shook the foil of his own prayer life "in public" must remain something of a puzzlement. But perhaps that is the final "UL seal of approval" that marks the genuineness of this monk's passage. When it came to God, Merton wrote, "silence makes more sense than a lot of words." Thanks to Cunningham, we have both.